On 24th September, Raytheon was awarded a contract worth $39 million (€28 million) to supply 15 AN/APG-79 radars for US Navy Boeing F/A-18E/F combat aircraft for delivery by 2015.

Deliveries of the first low-rate initial production radar to Boeing for installation onboard the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet occurred in January 2005. This was followed in June 2005 with a contract worth $580 million (€444 million) for the delivery of 180 radars for installation on the Super Hornet over a five-year period.

In May 2013, a firm fixed-price delivery contract worth €6.5 million ($8.6 million) was awarded to Raytheon by the US Navy’s Naval Air Systems Command at Patuxent River, Maryland for the supply of three AN/APG-79 radars.

The US Navy is upgrading its F/A-18E/F Super Hornets with Raytheon’s AN/APG-79. The upgrade will allow some of the legacy Raytheon AN/APG-73 radars outfitting early F/A-18E/F airframes to be cascaded down to other US Navy and Marine Corps Hornets which are still using the legacy Raytheon AN/APG-65 system.

The AN/APG-79 is essentially an AN/APG-65 radar family member with the additional of an Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) antenna.

No official details have been released by the AN/APG-79’s manufacturer regarding the radar’s performance and specification, although unofficial sources state that the AESA antenna has up to 1,100 transmit/receive modules, and a range of over 123 nautical miles (228 kilometres) for a ten square-metre (107.6 square feet) sized target.